


Different Colors

by waywardriot



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Trauma Recovery, colorblind au, for the vanitas zine!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27333082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waywardriot/pseuds/waywardriot
Summary: He watches the colors spread beneath his feet, rushing around like water and coating every last piece of glass. When they reach the edges, they slowly bleed down the sides and trickle back into the abyss. Once the last red is colored in, he’s buoyed back up by a freeing tide until he breaks past the surface, gasping for his first breath like he was drowning. Somehow, the colors let him be freed and born anew.Under Xehanort's influence, Vanitas can't see colors—but with the help of his friends, he remembers what it's like to be free.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	Different Colors

**Author's Note:**

> this is my piece for the vanitas zine! it's a year old now so it doesn't quite live up to my standards anymore, but i hope y'all still like it!
> 
> this operates under an au where vanitas is colorblind (except he can see eye colors). i took a LOT of liberties with the lod's layout so just pretend the outside is like. normal and not weirdly designed lmao

For so long, Vanitas’s life has been painted in washed-out greys. 

Even his memories have been drained of color. With enough concentration, he can almost see the truth in their past, but the flickers remain mockingly colorblind. His soul knows what they should look like, the shades painstakingly tattooed on the knots of his heart, but they’re locked behind a door closed so long ago. He never even entertains the thought that this could change, because to him this is inexorable, yet another unfortunate facet of his damaged existence.

The horrible irony of his life, whether one from fate or the hand of a cruel master, is that all he ever sees in color are _eyes_. Sickly yellows and vibrant blues and everything in between haunt him, unblinking irises hanging in the background of his nightmares, and there’s nothing he despises more than the molten gold that continues to mock him endlessly while others pass by with blues that were taken from him. 

As much as it stings, this is reality, and Vanitas stopped entertaining dreams long, long ago. So many hopes died in the desert, and no bloom of color has been able to push through the cracked dirt since.

Until one day—the quiet shadow of a girl who knows manipulation and imprisonment all the same offers him a chance. Despite all the hands he’s slapped away, she offers hers with a promise: she will untangle the strings that have wound him into a trap for far too long.

For days, weeks, months, he evades and evades and evades, for he doesn’t believe it could work. The consequences could span wide and far—he could crumble and fall apart; or his heart could fall asleep, suit to his other half; or he could become someone no one recognizes; or he could cease to exist, devoid of what defines him. 

That poisonous thought has wormed its way into the folds of his brain until he accepted the truth—he’s nothing without Xehanort, nothing but an empty shell of a boy who lost everything before he ever had anything at all.

_

“You define me, Sora, the same way that Ventus does.”

_

Those words have weighed immeasurably in his mouth and his heart, a platitude that lost its truth with each step he took independent of those two—but no matter how far he walks, no matter how much time trickles by, no matter how fundamentally he changes, Xehanort will always define him. 

Even shattered, all mirrors tell the same story; those eyes are _his_ , neither Ventus’s nor Sora’s, and no mask can ever erase Xehanort’s mark, even long after he disappeared into the cosmos. 

It’s only the endless taunting of blue within his home—their home—and long-forgotten dreams dredged up that drive him forwards. A tentative hope for the future lets him claw his way out of the void and ask for those helping hands that were once offered and always scorned. 

Without question, five sets of blue eyes take both his hands and pull him into a light he can’t yet understand—but one day, he just might.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Weeks of meticulous planning and many private breakdowns later, Vanitas sits in the Land of Departure’s infirmary, legs crossed beneath him and fingers worrying at themselves. The fear that sits heavy in his chest makes him feel like he’s self-destructing, and every old impulse screams at him to tear himself into pieces: bite his nails raw, yank his hair out, chew his mouth bloody.

Only the unwavering presence of the ones tied closest to him keeps his feet on the ground and his head out of the depths; without them, there would be no chance. They are his saving grace, his hope, his wishes realized into five bodies that are so similar yet so unique—although he’ll never say something that cheesy out loud. 

“Are you ready?” Naminé asks him in that soft voice of hers that always soothes. She sits there next to the bed, sketchbook clutched tightly to her chest like a shield ( _and maybe it’ll shield him, too_ ). Vanitas can’t quite comprehend it, but that collection of paper is what might free him after so long.

“Child’s play. It’s not like my heart’s never been tampered with before,” he replies easily, waving a hand that he would swear isn’t shaking. Despite this attempt to pretend nothing is wrong, to pretend he’s not scared out of his mind, even his usual tactics can’t trick him into calming down when so many variables are up in the air.

And for perhaps the first time in his miserable existence, Vanitas genuinely wants to keep living.

That want crept up on him slowly. It’s become the things he finally owns, the friends he’s made, the home he’s found in a once forbidden place, and to lose that would be to break. None of them have any idea what’s going to happen to him, but of course the others, always optimistic, insist this will work, but he errs on the side of pessimism—perhaps he’ll be banished, lost to time, pushed further into the depths. 

This could have been Xehanort’s will all along, and that’s what he’s most afraid of: letting that monster control him ever again.

“It’s okay to be scared, you know!” Sora says, his hands folded behind his back earnestly as he bounces on the balls of his feet, more excited for this than Vanitas himself. 

“I’m not scared!” Vanitas spits out, crossing his arms over his chest defensively, but he can tell that by the way the others are looking at him that the lie doesn’t faze them in the slightest. They’ve learned his defense mechanisms all too well and can see how they’re being stacked up one by one, just like the lost boy who once stumbled into this castle with his mind cracked and heart hollowed by war.

“Whatever you say, Vanitas,” Roxas says in a dry tone that makes Vanitas prickle, and he whips his head towards him. 

Before an argument can start, Xion’s voice cuts through, amused and understanding in a way that begets her existence. “Stop stalling! Naminé’s ready too, right?” she says, turning to her with a soft smile.

“Of course,” Naminé says, laying her sketchbook down in her lap as she turns to a new page and plucks a grey pencil from behind her ear. “Go ahead when you’re ready, Vanitas.”

With a last exhale, he settles his hands in his lap and casts a gaze over the eyes he knows like the back of his hand. This is too abrupt, but if he doesn’t take the dive, he never will. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”

Then, he closes his own eyes and lets himself teeter forward into the abyss.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
It feels like it’s been years since he’s witnessed his heart, but it looks almost the same as always—and that’s why Vanitas hates looking at it. 

Half is complete with his sleeping body and a few changes over the years; instead of a graveyard, now a castle looms, and evidence of his friendships surrounds him. On the other hand, the other half is still falling apart with pieces tumbling into the abyss, but it’s at least more complete than it once was. 

But most notably, the mosaic is void and lacking, and no matter how many times he sees it, the dullness still makes bile want to rise up his throat. No matter how hard he tries to ignore it, nothing can quell the despair and regret this brings up. 

Despite what the others say, Vanitas doesn’t think his heart can ever differ from this destruction, but he’s willing to give it a chance. 

While the sight makes him want to immediately wake up, there’s a purpose to being here, he reminds himself. As he stands on the glass, he feels Naminé’s efforts reverberating through his heart, which inexplicably covers him with some sense of peace that muffles the anxiety into a faint buzz. Here, where he’s never before felt safe, an assortment of connections ties him down and promises there is no danger. 

He senses himself drifting away, featherlight, until he’s watching from above and staring at his body, looking so small and meek surrounded by so many strangling hues. He briefly wonders if he’s being released from reality, if his heart truly did lack the strength. 

But then... Naminé succeeds. 

All at once, it’s like a film is being peeled off his vision, and lights dance up from underneath his heart. Piece by painstaking piece, colors are revealed: shades of red that once painted his eyes, greens that remind him of a gap that doesn’t ache as much, blues that were stolen straight from his head.

Nothing could have prepared him for this, for a locked door bursting open and flooding him with everything within. Suddenly, he’s again inhabiting his body with his feet on the glass, and then he reels, grabbing at his head and trying not to collapse. 

Some small part of his mind remembers that this was how Ventus looked when his memories returned, and Vanitas barks out a laugh at how stupid he must appear. That thought knocks his brain back into place, and he shakes his head violently to chase away the fog. 

He watches the colors spread beneath his feet, rushing around like water and coating every last piece of glass. When they reach the edges, they slowly bleed down the sides and trickle back into the abyss. Once the last red is colored in, he’s buoyed back up by a freeing tide until he breaks past the surface, gasping for his first breath like he was drowning. Somehow, the colors let him be freed and born anew. 

That’s what he now is: a renewed existence, a slate wiped clean, chalk offered for him to create his own vision.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
As Vanitas blinks his eyes open against the daylight, the first thing he sees clearly is a pencil in Naminé’s hand.

Green. 

Next is a mess of blonde curls as Ventus invades his vision, inspecting him like a science experiment—which is almost what this is, if not less science and more magical nonsense. 

“Huh... I wondered if your eyes would change,” Ventus says with a hum, leaning in to get a closer look while he gently touches Vanitas’s cheek. 

“Stop that,” Vanitas snaps in response as he smacks Ventus’s hand away, “I’m darkness. Of course my eyes are still like this.”

“That old argument.”

Vanitas scoffs and looks away. That appears as dismissive as always, but really, he just has to look away from that sunshine face before it burns him the same gentle shade as Ventus’s cheeks. 

“How are you feeling?” Naminé asks, always somewhat cautious, although not in a way that says she thinks Vanitas is a monster. No, she handles him as she does anyone else, and that’s something so important to him—even if he never says it.

“Fine,” he says gruffly, folding his arms. Mentally, he decides that he’ll thank her later, but only when they’re not surrounded by prying ears and gossiping mouths. The look she gives him says she understands, and once again, Vanitas wonders how she knows him so well.

There’s an expectant pause, and then Vanitas carefully speaks up again, trying to keep his voice level and free of the panic that’s flooding him. His breath is stuck in his windpipe and his throat drier than years of dust, but eventually he finds his tongue, and a word springs to mind as his heart effortlessly remembers long stolen things.

“Her pencil is green,” he says plainly, more to himself than anyone else, but everyone hears and knows exactly what he means. He doesn’t even need to look to feel the smiles splitting across their faces, eager hands grabbing onto one another’s with unrestrained joy. 

“Vanitas—can you really...?” Roxas asks with an uncharacteristically excited tone, one full of anticipation as it waits for his confirmation.

Vanitas pauses again. If he says it aloud, will that jinx it? Will the colors again slip away and taunt him, just like every other stupid thing in his life?

( _Those may be thoughts of a past boy, but they will always haunt him._ )

Voice beginning to subtly waver, all he says is, “These are red,” plucking at the straps that cross his chest.

The weight of every color in existence has fallen on his shoulders, tasting and feeling like confusion, and everything is so loud. His hands curl into fists on his thighs while potential Unversed itch to escape and release this tension. 

“This must be a lot to handle,” Xion says in that tone that always manages to temper the raging beast inside of Vanitas, and he exhales a careful breath as she speaks. Her presence is something to focus on, something to tie him to reality and his feet to the ground. She’s right, as she always is, somehow aware of what he needs. She understands so well that it scares him, and sometimes he could swear her gaze is peeling him open layer by layer.

“Ah—” Ventus starts before he’s cut off with a withering look from Naminé, who is always on Vanitas’s side (and he wouldn’t want it any other way, the little sneak she can be).

“Having your heart changed so much takes a toll. You should go rest, Vanitas,” Naminé says, tucking her pencil behind her ear and clutching her sketchbook once again.

Now that she mentions it, Vanitas does feel awfully tired; the weight that was lifted off of him has been replaced by a different kind, and a yawn climbs from his mouth before he can stop it. “Yeah, okay,” he mutters, scowling at the sound of giggles.

“I’ll come with—” two voices ring out almost simultaneously, and Ventus and Xion give each other side-eyed glances that become more laughs. 

Vanitas promptly turns his head so the others won’t see his tiny smile and waves a hand as he hops off the bed and begins walking away. “No way. I’ve had my ear talked off enough today.”

There are sounds of offense and protest from Ventus and Sora—accompanied by laughter from Roxas and Xion—but Vanitas is left alone, thankfully. His lonely footsteps echo through the halls as he walks, sounding both heavier and lighter than they did mere hours ago. What an odd feeling, to have his heart lifted of a burden that he had become too accustomed to to really notice. Something different has taken up residence in his heart, as weighted as before but in a different way—the potential for a new beginning. 

“Red,” he says once he reaches his room and stands in front of the door, “again.”

At first, he has no idea why red has been chosen to represent him—then suddenly the now-colorful image of a younger self outlined in red pops up in his head. Is that his favorite color? He’s unsure, but it tastes warm and curls nicely around his ribs. 

Before he can further dwell on what was chosen for him, he opens the door and closes it behind him, not slamming it or kicking the door frame as he normally does. Thankfully, his room isn’t loud and colorful like he highly expects Ventus’s room to be. It doesn’t pop much at all, with dark furniture, and accents of black and deep red. It’s calm enough for him to take it in without the buzzing in his ears increasing, and he allows himself to observe it for about thirty seconds before falling face-down on his bed. 

Within moments, he’s out, dragged down into a saturated dream. 

( _Their tangled hearts create something that tastes too sweet and too sour, burning on his tongue and settling deep in his marrow._

 _New experiences knock around his empty head and slam up against his eyes until he’s crying tears stained gold._ )  
  
  


* * *

  
  
How many hours he sleeps, Vanitas doesn’t know, but he’s abruptly woken by a banging on his door. It’s flung open before he can even make a move, and he quickly sits up on instinct.

“Come in,” he says, pointedly a few beats late, which earns a laugh. 

“Sorry, sorry! I just got excited!” Sora grins, having the common sense to look bashful and awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “So! How do you feel?”

“Okay, I guess—”

Vanitas is cut off when Sora suddenly approaches him, staring at his face more closely with steadily rising eyebrows, and then he holds up a finger. “Hold that thought! I’ll be right back!”

Just like that, he’s gone, and Vanitas simply sighs and runs a hand through his hair. By now, he’s more than used to Sora’s inattentiveness and distractibility, so it barely fazes him—although he’ll always pretend it’s annoying just for show. 

Before he knows it, Sora has returned with a perplexed-looking Ventus in tow. They come to a stop at the bed, and Sora points straight at Vanitas’s face, so close that Vanitas has to cross his eyes to see his finger. “See! You see it, right?”

Ventus opens his mouth, brows furrowed in confusion, before he snaps his jaw shut and leans forward, far too close for Vanitas’s liking. Everyone should know that he hates being scrutinized because it makes him feel like they’re opening him up. 

What comes next is also surprising as Ventus stretches one of Vanitas’s eyes open wider with two fingers and peers in like he’ll find the meaning of life. “Holy shit, you’re right,” he breathes out, and that’s how Vanitas knows something real is happening—Ventus _never_ swears, not unless he’s exceptionally shocked. 

“What the hell is going on?” Vanitas asks, smacking Ventus’s hand away like earlier and instinctively baring his teeth. 

“Hang on!” Ventus says, turning around and swiveling his head like he’s looking for something, and then he exasperatedly sighs once his eyes land on a mirror cracked so badly that it’s unusable. “ _Again_ , Vanitas?”

“I don’t like mirrors!”

“Well, whatever.” Ventus quickly pulls out his Gummiphone and selects the camera app before thrusting it at Vanitas’s face, nearly smacking him in the nose.

“Calm down,” Vanitas snaps—then he pauses and, with shaking hands and nails bitten to the quick, carefully takes the phone and holds it closer to his face.

There, drowning in a pool of harsh gold, is a ring of green surrounding his pupil and worming its way into the iris. It’s so subtle that he doesn’t know how Sora picked up on it, but he truly can be more observant than others think.

For a few moments, Vanitas is completely speechless, his jaw slack as he tilts the screen towards his other eye—a ring of green as well. Back and forth, back and forth, both remain green. “They aren’t his anymore...?” is all he can think to say.

“Huh?” Sora succinctly asks, leaning closer to Vanitas and cocking his head.

“Nevermind. Just—what the hell is happening?”

“I was right about your eyes changing colors,” Ventus says with a smug grin as he takes his phone back and tucks it in his pocket. “Your eyes are—were?—gold because of Xehanort, right? Now that he’s gone… I think that’s the light that’s grown in you, Vanitas, and now it can come forward. Blue and gold—”

“—make green,” Vanitas finishes, his hands flexing into fists against his knees and then releasing, repetitive and soothing. His mind is once again on the verge of overflowing, and it becomes too much to take. “Enough. Enough,” he says through a clenched jaw, standing up and shouldering Ventus and Sora out of the way. “I—I need air. I’m going outside. Don’t bother me.”

Ventus and Sora say something, but Vanitas doesn’t know or care what it is, because he’s already striding out the door and rushing towards the entrance to the castle. Colors shine down onto the floor through stained glass windows, and that myriad is yet another drop in the bucket waiting to spill over and drown him. He closes his eyes and claps his hands over his ears—not like that could help—and soon, he’s bursting out of the front doors at a jog. 

Even after all this time, it’s still slightly jarring to step outside and be surrounded by flora and fauna instead of endless dust and sharp rocks that dig into his flesh. This time, though? It’s… incredible—but hand in hand with that, it’s absolutely overwhelming as all of his senses are inundated with colors that he’d forgotten the importance of. The first one is green (somehow it always comes back to that), so much vibrant _green_ leaving him dazed. Once he blinks the spots out of his eyes, he squints at his surroundings and tries to mentally sort through each color.

Everything is so familiar yet still so foreign, almost like his brain had stored all this visual information away over the years, locking it underneath once unbreakable glass. The greens feel soft against his skin, the blue of the sky is cold on his tongue, the bright red flowers tingle along his scalp, and it’s just… good. Wholly and completely good, a sensation he’s been deprived of for most of his existence, but now there’s so much more than his old, broken heart could have ever contained.

Vanitas barely dares to think it, but he feels like a kid with a real chance to take back what was ripped from his hands without a second thought. That thought inspires him to let himself wander free, and so he does, inspecting each new shade found with a child’s curiosity.

Eventually he ends up sitting beneath a tree, branches drooping down over his head and crying for all the time lost to a sinkhole of black and white. Leaning his head back against the trunk, he stares up at the sky in a daze, the potent blue interspersed with white and slightly muffled by a veil of green leaves. His hands scrape across the grass, and while he has felt it before, something about it feels different this time: softer, more inviting, like he should just lay down and fall asleep.

There’s no way his mind can rest, though, and he suddenly jumps up, yanking out grass along the way. In the copse of trees, he searches for the tallest one and begins to climb it without hesitation. Because he’s Vanitas, he has no care for the bark scraping his palms or the danger of falling, his eyes only fixed upwards and on his goal.

Thanks to his athletics, he reaches the top of the tree in record time and stands up on a branch, clutching at the trunk for balance. Up here, he can see everything surrounding the castle, and he stares at the open sky and the scenery that stretches out, color reaching the horizon and beckoning him to traverse it. In his mind’s eye, he can almost see wings unfurling from his back, snapping out from his bones and coming into existence; feathers carry him away from his past, boundless and unrestrained. Perhaps he could be this free…

“I sound like Ventus and Sora,” Vanitas says to himself with a scoff, shaking his head. That does nothing to hinder the grin that has snuck up on his face, though, and his cheeks actually hurt from how unfamiliar it is. He’s certainly glad no one could see him like this, or he’d never live it down.

As he stands atop the tree like a king and soaks the view in, the all-encompassing emotions that came hand in hand with colors temper down, and any threat of Unversed is gone. This newfound control soon has him eager to keep exploring, so he scrambles his way back down the tree, almost falling down several times, but the almost manic grin on his face never falters.

There’s always a quiet call in his heart that wants him to gravitate to the place where this all started, the place that haunts his sleeping and waking and stretches out in the expanse of his thoughts: the rocks, the howling wind, the dust, the rotten keys.

He knows now that nothing but brown waits for him there, but he’s had enough of grit between his teeth and stones in his back, so for once his center of gravity keeps him right here, flitting along the castle’s grounds like a bird in his heart. That impels him to take off sprinting just to feel the wind in his hair and flow freely along like water, and he indulges himself. While he tells himself he looks like an idiot, he really can’t bother to care for once, because his feet are finally no longer bound to the earth by the iron chains of a long-dead man.

There’s so much more to see, so he can’t stay still at all. 

Eventually he breathlessly stops and squats next to a small creek, admiring how blue the water is—until he realizes that he sees more green than he should. Falling back onto his rear, he pulls his Gummiphone out of his pocket and directs the camera to his face. 

In such little time, those delicate rings of green have spread, overtaking most of his irises until only the edges remain gold. 

“How the hell did the light...?” he says as he prods at his cheek. Not much more than an hour could have passed, yet here it is, as clear as day: light clawing its way out of a prison. “ _‘I’m just darkness’_ , huh?” he mimics to himself with a scoff. It appears he’d been more wrong than he’d ever thought—which his pride hates.

Maybe those idiots had a point all along. Those war-ridden words hadn’t been facetious nonsense offered in some frail hope of cobbling Vanitas back together—they’re a hope that had been stronger than he thought all along. 

He marvels over his eyes for a few more moments before turning his phone off and tucking it away, and his gaze returns to the water, magnetically pulled there like the endless flow of slightly muddied blue will give him an epiphany. 

All the water offers is himself, hair tousled from running, brow actually relaxed, eyes as green as an unbreakable bond.

That’s him—that’s his face, those are his eyes, that’s his hair and his nose and his freckles, only now able to be perceived because they’re not covered by greys.

His reflection is dispersed as he smacks his hand through the water, making it disappear along with all the other whirls and waves—but it appears again, as it always will, and he has a realization. 

For the first time ever, he doesn’t feel like a guest in his own body. Yes, his heart will always ache for something to fill in the missing spaces, but now? Now he owns who he’s become instead of trying to fit back into a nonexistent void. That clever little witch’s brush has helped him paint wide strokes, ones very much needed and surprisingly welcomed.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
After Vanitas follows his instinct and takes a brief nap like he wished before, he returns to the castle only to find a small group awaiting his presence—completely unnerving, but they’re just like that naturally. 

“Hey, wait! Your eyes are all green now!” Sora shouts immediately, standing on his tiptoes to lean in and look closer. 

The others exchange looks before one speaks up. “Is that okay, Vanitas?” Xion asks—the only other one who has dealt with gold eyes and knows their heavy burden. 

Vanitas tips his head back to look at the sky, which seems to have grown even more blue as the few clouds have been chased away like a fleeting, unimportant thought. The light shedding down on him is too bright, but he doesn’t squint; he opens those new eyes wide and stares upward.

“Yeah. They’re mine now.”

Met with bright smiles from his friends, he offers them a small one that shines enough to make up for every doubt and fear that will always lurk within his heart. The black of the darkness can never be fully suffocated, but it can be painted over with shades borrowed from the people he knows and the ones freed from his memories.

His all along.


End file.
